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Are you ready to party yourself into shape? That’s exactly what the Zumba program is all about. It’s an exhilarating, effective, easy-to-follow, Latin-inspired, calorie-burning dance fitness-party that’s moving millions of people toward joy and health.Meet in the Guilford Reception at 1:10pm on Saturday 2nd March and we’ll walk over to Nuffield Health Gym together for the hour session that starts at 1:30pm . Wear comfortable clothing and trainers (clothes that you would wear to the gym) and bring your student ID cards!Check your emails for the signup link!

A night out in London doesn’t have to involve the pub! If you’re looking for a stimulating evening, often at little or no cost, there are a wealth of talks and lectures taking place in London. This email’s aim is to act as a starting point for your intellectual exploration of London. Your lecturers will also be a good source of information.

Please scroll down for events taking place this month. If you come across any events you would like us to share with other students, please email academics@nyu.ac.uk.

Pierre Moscovici will address both the policy outlook in France and the on-going crisis management developments at the European level.

Pierre Moscovici was appointed Minister of the Economy and Finance on 16 May 2012, following the election of President François Hollande. He has been involved in European and international affairs as well as in national politics, in particular on fiscal issues. He was first a member of the European Parliament from 1994 to 1997, and became one of its vice-presidents from 2004 to 2007. In the meantime, he was elected to France’s National Assembly in 1997 (and was later re-elected in 2007 and 2012), in the constituency of Doubs in eastern France, and was appointed Minister for European Affairs in the government of Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 2002, where he was specifically involved in finalizing the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997 and negotiating the Nice Treaty in 2000. He was also involved in negotiating the European Constitutional Treaty of 2004 and was a vigorous advocate of its adoption in France. Before holding elected office, he worked for the French Socialist Party, which he joined back in 1984 as an expert on fiscal issues. Pierre Moscovici joined the Audit Court (Cour des Comptes) after graduating from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) in 1984

If you are interested in history, you visit battlefields and castles. If architecture, cathedrals and stately homes. But if your interest is in the English language, where do you go?

Davidand Hilary Crystal have, over the past year, been visiting locations in England, Scotland, and Wales where something of importance happened that helped to shape our understanding of English, and in this photographically illustrated talk they present some of their findings.

There were some unanticipated encounters. They were expecting to meet up with Anglo-Saxon kings, monks, and poets, early grammarians and lexicographers, dialect enthusiasts and phoneticians, and the many scholars and writers who shaped standard English in Britain, but they weren’t expecting to make contact with the world of lead thieves and hovercrafts, or see a procession of modern minimonks. Why were they fooled into thinking there was a monument to the definite article? Or that the mystery of the contents of Shakespeare’s grave would finally be revealed? And why did they encounter Elvis Presley - twice?

David Crystal is one of the world’s leading experts on the history and development of the English language.

Gasworks presents the first UK solo exhibition by New York-based artist Lana Lin, who is currently studying via NYU London as part of the Global Research Institute.

Since the early 1990s, Lin has developed a rich body of film and video work dealing with the processes of identification, memory and the politics of translation. These works are largely informed by experimental and documentary filmmaking and raise questions about media representation and the sense of estrangement it can produce.

Bringing together films, videos and video installations from the 1990s and early 2000s, her exhibition at Gasworks speculates on the problems of translation across cultures, whether between the so-called East and West, or between our world and other worlds.

Presenting these films and installations together for the first time, this exhibition foregrounds Lin’s long-standing interest in what is at stake in processes of translation and identification, both personally and politically.

Global Design NYU Elsewhere Envisioned – Opening Party

Date: Thursday 20th September 2012 (the exhibition is free to enter from 20th September - 20th October)

This ground breaking exhibition explores how architecture and design can help reduce climate change and bridge the gap between people and the natural world. Elsewhere Envisioned will draw more than 30 leading designers, architects, landscape architects, urbanists, historians, and scientists to London’s Building Centre.

Hosted by NLA – London’s Centre for the Built Environment, Elsewhere Envisioned is presented by GLOBAL design NYU (GDNYU), directed and curated by New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study professors Peter Anker, Louise Harpman and Mitchell Joachim. On show is drawings and physical models by leading architects and designers.

Over 750 buildings are open to the public over the weekend of the 22nd – 23rd September, Free admission to all, including those that normally charge entrance fees. Some buildings are only open to the public this weekend. The website hosts an online guide, and hard copies of the guide are available in local libraries.

Big Ideas is a series of events, mostly held in pubs in London. Anyone is welcome to turn up.

Sessions generally start with a question. Someone who has some relevant expertise gives a very brief, informal talk. After that a discussion develops in a free and unstructured manner. It’s not a lecture, and it’s not a debate; it’s a pub argument, but unlike any you’ve had before.

The term landscape, derived from the sixteenth-century Dutch word landschap, was originally used for the demarcation of land but has subsequently become associated with a way of seeing space from a distance. This sense of landscape as a visual panorama — developing initially through landscape art — has subsequently expanded and diversified in the modern era to include a variety of urban and industrial spaces and their representations in art, cinema and literature. To what extent does our concept of landscape determine how we experience these spaces and representations? What happens when we see and experience a landscape?

Speaker: Professor Sir Richard Evans FBA. Regius Professor of Modern History and President if Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge.

Bubonic plague first swept Europe in the age of Justinian, in the sixth century, killing an estimated 25 million people in the Byzantine Empire and spreading further west. Its most devastating outbreak was in mid-fourteenth-century Europe, when it destroyed perhaps a third of the continent’s population. Italian city-states pioneered the policies of quarantine and isolation that remained standard preventive measures for many centuries; religious revival and popular disturbances, crime and conflict may have spread as life was cheapened by the mass impact of the plague. The economic effects of the drastic reduction in population were severe, though not necessarily negative. Later outbreaks of the plague culminated in outbreaks in Seville (1647), London (1665), Vienna (1679) and Marseilles (1720) and then it disappeared from Europe while recurring in Asia through the nineteenth century. The plague set the template for many later confrontations with epidemic disease, discussed in the following lectures.

This lecture is part of the series, The Great Plagues: Epidemics in History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day.

Chair: Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford, is a leading authority on early modern drama and culture.

Speakers:

Colin Burrow – University of Oxford, an authority on Elizabethan literature and author of Edmund Spenser (1996)

Andrew Hadfield – University of Sussex, the author of Edmund Spenser. A Life (OUP, 2012)

Simon Jarvis – Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Politics, University of Cambridge, is a cultural critic and poet

Anne Lake Prescott – Columbia University, is a leading authority in Spenser’s Writing and co-editor of the Norton Spenser

The purpose of this discussion is to re-evaluate and re-think the reputation of Edmund Spenser (1554?-99) in the light of the first biography for 60 years. Spenser is a key figure in English literary history, whose significance has been obscured, and it is an appropriate time to think about his importance. The panellists will debate a number of questions: what is Spenser’s poetic achievement? How far did his experience in Ireland leave its mark on his writing? How far can Spenser’s writing be read in terms of his life? What can we assume about his religious and political views?

Human Rights in Britain: The Black Abolitionists of the eighteenth Century: Africans in Britain’s resistance to slavery and inequality

Tate Film presents inspiring films, videos, installations and performances made by artists and filmmakers who seek to challenge the conventions of the moving image.

Anglophiles, historians, intellectuals and aesthetics embrace the Anthology Film Archives retrospective of the filmmaker Patrick Keiller, running through Wednesday. Since 1981 Mr Keiller, a leading light of Britain’s art cinema, has been making shorts and film essays with a formal, academic rigor influenced by the French avant-gardist Chris Marker (“La Jetée”). Mr Keiller is best known for the Robinson trilogy – “London” (1994), “Robinson in Space” (1997) and “Robinson in Ruins” (2010) – which is the centrepiece of Anthology’s review

RADA at Home is a night of carefree entertainment, nestled away in our secret Bloomsbury cabaret venue, The Club Theatre. Expect music, song and first-class theatrical entertainment from our very own graduates, performing in their element at home at RADA Studios.

Stripped is a new concept in promenade theatre. Each month a company of RADA trained actors will create performances of re-imagined classical texts, ‘stripped’ back to the bare bones, starting with Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at RADA Studios.

Directed by and starring RADA alumni from across the ages, Stripped showcases some of Britain’s best acting talent in one of Ibsen’s most prolific and popular plays, featuring one of theatre’s greatest heroines. Defamiliarising this classic text by staging it across a number of spaces, the audience are free to wander between scenes and take charge of their own individual theatrical experience.